Certain technological systems or services are intended to leverage a large number of participants. When such systems do not reach their full potential until there are sufficient participants, they may be said to demonstrate the “network effect” or “network externalities.” The network effect implies that the value of a product or service depends upon the number of users employing the technology. A historic example was the facsimile (fax) machine. The more users who adopted the fax machine, the more useful or valuable a fax machine became to each user.
As with the fax machine example, many communication systems and features thereof exhibit the network effect. Extending features of a communication modality may also require wide adoption to realize its usefulness. For example, the technology to extend electronic mail to allow attaching files depended upon most or all email clients adopting the technology before its use could become common practice and thus truly beneficial to users. The transition from not having a technological feature to enough users having the technological feature to become commonly useful can be complicated by many factors.
There is a need in the art for change management mechanisms supporting the phasing-in of technological features when these features exhibit the network effect and thus depend upon wide adoption before becoming useful, valuable, or even meaningful to users. There is further need for these change management mechanisms to support extending or improving existing systems or services by phasing in new technological features.